Chaotic Features of Decomposed Time Series from Tidal River Water Level

This study assessed the characteristics of water-level time series of a tidal river by decomposing it into tide, wave, rainfall-runoff, and noise components. Especially, the analysis for chaotic behavior of each component was done by estimating the correlation dimension with phase-space reconstruction of time series and by using a close returns plot (CRP). Among the time series, the tide component showed chaotic characteristics to have a correlation dimension of 1.3. It was found out that the water level has stochastic characteristics showing the increasing trend of the correlation exponent in the embedding dimension. Other components also showed the stochastic characteristics. Then, the CRP was used to examine the characteristics of each component. The tide component showed the chaotic characteristics in its CRP. The CRP of water level showed an aperiodic characteristic which slightly strayed away from its periodicity, and this might be related to the tide component. This study showed that a low water level is mainly affected by a chaotic tide component through entropy information. Even though the water level did not show chaotic characteristics in the correlation dimension, it showed stochastic chaos characteristics in the CRP. Other components showed stochastic characteristics in the CRP. It was confirmed that the water level showed chaotic characteristics when it was not affected by rainfall and stochastic characteristics deviating from the bounded trajectory when water level rises due to rainfall. Therefore, we have shown that the water level related to the chaotic tide component can also have chaotic properties because water level is influenced by chaotic tide and rainfall shock, thus it showed stochastic chaos characteristics.